One friend we have lunch with every week or so generally does not use a credit card. When she does, she still leaves the tip in cash. We had the discussion about this and for quite some time, I continued to add it to my credit card. Now, as it happens, some of the places in town have switched to including an automatic service fee. Anyway, I got to thinking about this and like a lot of people, I don’t necessarily carry a lot of different bills with me. On the other hand, due to a couple of different things, I have to make bank runs fairly often. I started swapping out some of my twenties for $5s and $10s and keep those in a separate envelop at home that I then transfer some of the bills every few days into my wallet to use for cash tips now.

Aside from allowing the server to have immediate cash, I am not quite certain how a place handles tips from credit cards. For example, does the server get the entire tip or do they subtract the credit card fee? Do they give the server the tip along with their paycheck? I simply hadn’t really thought of these this until watching my friend. The one thing though is if a tip is automatically included at say 18% and I ordinarily tip 20%, that can be more complicated. Adding the extra in this case might mean I need to have some $1s to augment. That, and if the tip is more than $20 is when I may well keep it on the credit card.